L.Aurence des Cars has a deep voice and she laughs loudly when asked what her favorite painting in the Louvre is. “Don’t ask me!” Answers the 54-year-old art historian, who is the first woman to be entrusted with the management of the world’s largest museum. She diplomatically declares that she cannot have any favorites. “The whole Louvre is my favorite museum,” she says. From September 1st, the dark-haired, boyish Parisian from an old noble family will be in charge of the 145,000 square meter Louvre and its 2,000 employees. Your annual budget is around 240 million euros.
Des Cars has been the first woman at the helm since the museum was founded in 1793. President Emmanuel Macron chose it this way because he trusts the assertive director to steer the flagship of the French museums safely through the stormy times. Since March 2017 she has skilfully directed the Impressionist Museum Musée d’Orsay and the small Musée de l’Orangerie in the Tuileries Garden. She demonstrated that a museum can be an “echo chamber” of society, as she puts it. It is important to her to draw the link to current social debates with exhibitions. When the “Black Lives Matter” movement spilled over from America to France, it opened an exhibition on the “Black Model from Géricault to Matisse” in the Orsay Museum. Her good contacts in America allowed her to work closely with the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University in New York.
.
source https://pledgetimes.com/2021/06/laurence-des-cars-the-manager-of-the-louvre/
Disqus comments